Timothée Chalamet surprised everyone at the A Complete Unknown premiere in New York City, debuting a blonde hair transformation.
The Call Me by Your Name star stunned at the red carpet premiere in the Big Apple on Friday, December 13, at the SVA Theater, sporting his new hair only days after making an appearance at the Los Angeles premiere of the Bob Dylan biopic.
Chalamet was channeling Bob Dylan, who sported a similar look back in 2003 when he appeared at the Sundance Film Festival for a screening of his film Masked and Anonymous.
Chalamet plays a young Bob Dylan in the James Mangold-directed film based on the Elijah Wald 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric. The film follows Dylan as he moves from Minnesota to the Big Apple and the controversy around the use of electric instruments.
A Complete Unknown was co-written by Mangold and Jay Cocks, and it also stars Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbert Leo Butz, and Scoot McNairy.
Ahead of the biopic’s premiere, co-star Norton praised Chalamet for his work ethic in giving life to Dylan.
“He was relentless. No visitors, no friends, no reps, no nothing. ‘Nobody comes around us while we’re doing this.’ We’re trying to do the best we can with something that’s so totemic and sacrosanct to many people,” Norton told Rolling Stone.
Norton continued, “And I agreed totally — it was like, we cannot have a f***ing audience for this. We’ve got to believe to the greatest degree we can. And he was right to be that protective.”
Chalamet noted that he learned from Christian Bale in Hostiles and Oscar Isaac in Dune how they “guard their process” while working, which he applied in A Complete Unknown.
“It was something I would go to sleep panicked about: losing a moment of discovery as the character — no matter how pretentious that sounds — because I was on my phone or because of any distraction,” Chalamet said. “I had three months of my life to play Bob Dylan, after five years of preparing to play him. So while I was in it, that was my eternal focus. He deserved that and then more.… God forbid I missed a step because I was being Timmy. I could be Timmy for the rest of my life!”
RELATED: James Mangold’s ‘A Complete Unknown’: Everything We Know About The Bob Dylan Biopic So Far
Dylan called Chalamet a “brilliant actor” in a post he shared on X, the microblogging platform formerly known as Twitter, and assured his followers the actor was “going to be completely believable” as him.
During the LA premiere of A Complete Unknown, Chalamet told Deadline Dylan’s words were “really affirming,” adding, “It’s hard to tell. He’s a mysterious, elusive figure. So I figured if he or his team didn’t want me to be a part of it, I would’ve known about that. But equally, I didn’t really know how involved he’d be.”
Scroll through the photo gallery below to see the A Complete Unknown stars on the red carpet.
